At a time when collectors favor figurative art with a Surrealist tendency and when women artists are the focus of all attention, the work of Leonor Fini is being rediscovered in all its originality and power.
Self-taught, Leonor Fini paved her own way by working tirelessly. She also frequented some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the 20th century, including Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Dora Maar, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Federico Fellini, Georges Bataille and Paul Éluard. She approached painting through an alchemy of science, magic, dreams and legends, which together underpin the mysterious atmosphere of her paintings.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1907, Léonor Fini was raised by a single mother in Trieste, Italy. A precocious talent, she exhibited her paintings in her hometown at the age of seventeen, then went to Paris in 1931 with an Italian prince who she left immediately after frequenting the Surrealist circle around André Breton. She shared with the Surrealists a belief in the veracity and logic of dreams, but she refused to formally associate with the movement because, as she said, “there were laws and constraints that I would not have tolerated”. Her works reflect the Surrealist style well, but she disavowed its shackles to maintain the greatest possible independence in her professional life as well as in her personal life. Her œuvre was nonethelesse assimilated into Surrealist production in 1936, when her paintings were included in the exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York...
